Sarah Who?

I’m joining Joe as a conscientious objector to Palinmania. (Did anyone else start twitching less than a minute into the Barbara Walters interview?) Let’s focus instead on something a little less controversial like, oh, say, the Catholic church and gay rights.

Now, it’s possible to disagree with the church’s policy on partner benefits and it’s possible to argue that in this case the church knows that sticking with that policy will interfere with its ability to help the poor. But that’s different from the Archdiocese threatening to take its food kitchens and go home because the rules of the game have changed.

Just look at the news earlier this week from Salt Lake City, a bastion of conservative Mormonism, where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints backed — as in came out in public support of — a pair of ordinances that bar landlords and employers from discriminating based on sexual orientation. Mormon support cleared the way for unanimous passage of the measures, making Salt Lake City the first Utah city to provide such protections for gays and lesbians, something they do not enjoy even under state law.

The key to securing Mormon support was that the measures offered what a church official called “common-sense rights that should be available to everyone, while safeguarding the crucial rights of religious organizations — for example, in their hiring of people whose lives are in harmony with their tenets, or when providing housing for their university students and others that preserve religious requirements.” The D.C. City Council bill on same-sex marriage does not include such exemptions…

It should be clear from this review of the facts that the church is not threatening to withdraw its money from the poor. It is simply pointing out that it cannot observe these new requirements and therefore the city will cancel its contracts. It is in fact the city council that is closing down these programs, not the archdiocese.

City council members can still avert the canceling of Catholic contracts by working exemptions into the proposal they will consider next month. Whether they want to is another question.